Mommathon

The boys had their first baseball game of the season last weekend. The weather was perfect and the boys did a great job.

Colm gearing up to play catcher, which he doesn’t like, by the way.

Post game chat

Good game, good game, good game….

I finally got around to reading The Hunger Games. It is a good read and I get what all of the hype is about, but I am going to wait until I read the next one. My dreams are getting weird. I think my brain needs a break.

Getting the eggs ready the night before.

Trying to find that one last egg…we never did find it.

Post egg hunt egg roll which is really just an excuse to destroy their eggs.

Easter brunch

Book club is meeting at my house next week and this is the book we chose to read for this month. I liked it. It captures a family at a time in their lives when they are going through a very, very hard time. All families have their ups and downs, their baggage and secrets and they all seem to spill out at once for the Ryries. The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the ending. Things wrapped up a little too neatly for me.

In the morning we took a beautiful hike in the desert right outside our hotel. We were IN the desert. Colm is absolutely terrified of snakes and there was a VERY real possibility of us seeing one. I am super thankful that we did not because I don’t know what we would have done. The weather was perfect…a little warm with a light breeze…and it was a great family hike.

In case you are wondering what Colm is doing, he’s eating a pretzel.

Then we headed to Old Tucson Studios which is where they have shot lots of movies and TV shows. People walk around dressed up in time period clothes and the boys thought it was super cool.

This engine is apparently the most filmed engine ever.

Liam learning how to shoot a real gun with real bullets. He got three out of five shots close to the bullseye which I was impressed with since he’s never shot a gun in his life.

Panning for gold

We spent our morning at the Sonoran Desert Museum which I absolutely love. This was the third time I’d been there. Unfortunately, it was pretty hot that day, so a lot of animals were hiding in the shade and we didn’t get to see as many animals as I remember seeing on previous visits. It was still a great outing though and the boys still got to see lots of critters that live in the Sonoran Desert. My favorite are the javelinas which Liam also saw outside our hotel room one morning.

We spent the morning in Phoenix hiking around Papago Park which is near where I lived back in the late ’90s.

We hiked around on the path for a while and then decided to climb up a hill that was not on the path. We climbed up and scooted on our bottoms on the way down. Sean ripped out his pants and Liam got all the way down to the bottom of the hill safe and sound and then tripped on a rock and scraped up his knee pretty badly. We were done hiking anyways, so we went to a Walgreens where we could get some Band-Aids and Sean doctored him up.

We had lunch and then headed towards Tucson for the remainder of our trip.

The view from our room in Tucson.

A little poolside ping pong. I don’t know how I did’t get any pictures of them swimming in the lazy river. Both of our hotels had a lazy river and they spent quite a bit of time playing in both of them.

My friend, Kim, who grew up in Arizona highly recommended the Musical Instrument Museum. Holy cow! This is SUCH a cool place. A couple traveled the world and not only brought back instruments from every nook and cranny from all around the world, but also videotaped the native people playing the instruments…SO VERY COOL. The museum is divided up into continents and also has a room devoted to instruments for the children to play. This place is almost too big. We couldn’t do the whole thing.

See Colm’s headphones? The headphones know where you are in the museum so you can travel around the museum in whatever fashion you’d like and when you stop in front of a station it plays the music that is on the film footage that goes with that instrument.





One of the more “interesting” instruments. It’s from Malta.

After spending a large chunk of the day at the museum and another large chunk of the day playing at the pool I then went and met a couple of friends from when I lived in Phoenix. Rebecca was my roommate and I carpooled with Denise. Denise was also one of my maids of honor. They are two awesome ladies and I wish I would have taken a picture!!!

The view from our hotel room in Phoenix

The boys really wanted to go to Legoland again this year. I like Legoland as much as the next person, but it was definitely time to take a different direction with our vacations. I suggested Arizona since it’s warm and sunny and we used to live there. It turned out to be a great idea.

We went to Surprise, AZ where we watched the KC Royals play the Texas Rangers. We left in the middle of the 10th inning since we’d been up since 5:30 that morning so we’re not sure who won.

This is also where a very unhelpful policeman totally yelled at me when I stopped to ask him for directions. It’s a long story, but to sum it up, he felt like I should have had my blinker on and proceeded to be totally sarcastic with me and yell at me in front of the boys and Sean. It was fairly surreal and I was certain the Candid Camera must have been in the area. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Snowcones and baseball…the perfect combo!